Introducing My First Astrophotography Rig!

Back in July of this year, I ran a fundraiser to purchase some astrophotography specific equipment. I made a blog post with the results of the fundraiser, and the gear that was purchased.

Now that everything is here, and with some additional things bought out of pocket, it’s time to introduce you to my new astrophotography setup!

Canon RP on Skywatcher equatorial mount rig.

Canon R7 with Tamron 500mm f/8 and 1.4x teleconverter.

The first photo is of the rig that I’ll be doing most night sky photography with. It consists of my Canon EOS RP with a Tamron SP 60-300 F3.5-5.4 Adaptall-2 lens, an adapter to fit the lens to the camera, and an in-body light pollution filter. This sits atop the Skywatcher Sky Adventurer GTi equatorial mount and a Skywatcher Star Adventurer Tripod. This setup will allow me to shoot a variety of night sky objects from the milky way, Andromeda Galaxy, the Orion Nebula, and plenty more! Once properly aligned, it will keep the camera aimed at the target and take dozens or even hundreds of photos to be processed and stacked later.

The second photo I’m calling my “Moon bazooka” setup. It consists of my Canon EOS R7 with the Tamron SP 500mm f/8 55BB lens, a Tamron SP-140 1.4x teleconverter, and an adapter to fit the camera to the lens. This setup allows me an equivalent zoom of 1,120mm at f/11. While this aperture is far too small for imaging most night sky objects, it works perfectly well for very bright objects like the moon and even, when combined with a 20-stop ND filter, the sun! This setup can also be mounted to the equatorial mount as well.

I haven’t had the opportunity to deploy the equatorial rig for any night photography yet, but I have taken the opportunity to shoot both the sun and the moon with the bazooka setup. Photos below.

Full Blue Supermoon Rising, Aug 19th, 2024

Sun, Sept 4th, 2024

This setup will provide me opportunities to get some great astrophotography images. With the equatorial mount’s 11 pound load capacity, there is plenty of room for upgrading in the future. Some things I already have in mind are a portable power supply system, and additional lens or two. There are plenty of other upgrades possible, such as an ASI Air controller, or a dedicated refractor astrograph as a couple examples.

I also plan to have the RP modified to be a full spectrum camera at some point. A camera’s sensor is capable of recording wavelengths of light not visible to the human eye. Cameras are built with a filter preventing these wavelengths from reaching the camera’s sensor. Removing this filter allows for you to use filters to specify the wavelengths you want the sensor to record, which can be very important when photographing certain night sky objects.

Now that you’ve been introduced, let’s get this show on the road! With some cool, dark, and (hopefully) clear nights coming soon, I plan to have some amazing astrophotography images to share with you in the near future!

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